Ray Liotta doesn’t only play cold-eyed, purse-mouthed sociopaths who would sooner put a bullet in your head than shake your hand. “The next movie I’m doing is a preacher,” he told The Huffington Post. “I’ve done a lot of other kinds of movies. For some reason, the bad guys stand out in peoples’ minds.”

Maybe that’s because Liotta’s villains are the stuff nightmares are made of. He had three movies at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, and in two of them he plays the kind of guy who scars your whole family for life just by showing up on the doorstep. In Derek Cianfrance’s “The Place Beyond the Pines,” which was picked up by Focus Features, Liotta strikes fear into the heart of Bradley Cooper as a crooked cop who really, really doesn’t like snitches, and in Ariel Vroman’s “The Iceman” he portrays Gambino crew boss Roy DeMeo, who hires — and, ultimately, faces off against — a humorless hit man named Richie Kuklinski (Michael Shannon).